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Consumption concentration may be up, adding slightly to economic fragility
Analysts have taken notice of the large share of total U.S. spending attributable to the very highest earners. The concerns are that the emergence of K-shaped growth—bifurcated activity at an elevated rate among high earners and much more restrained among most others—may put the U.S. in greater economic peril.
Working Paper
Measuring consumer expenditures with payment diaries
As the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) illustrates, there are advantages to measuring consumer expenditures by tracking the authorization of payments by instrument type (cash, check, debit or credit card, etc.). The main advantages of payment diaries appear to be the following: 1) the ability to measure expenditures by payment instrument aggregated into lumpy purchases (?shopping baskets?), 2) relatively low respondent burden, and 3) effective random sampling. Three notable results emerge from comparing the 2012 DCPC estimates with estimates from other reputable estimates of the ...
Journal Article
Middle-skill jobs lost in U.S. labor market polarization
The number of people performing low-skill, low-pay, manual labor tasks has grown along with the number undertaking high-skill, high-pay, nonroutine, principally problem-solving jobs.
Working Paper
Very long-run discount rates
We provide direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We exploit a unique feature of housing markets in the U.K. and Singapore, where residential property ownership takes the form of either leaseholds or freeholds. Leaseholds are temporary, pre-paid, and tradable ownership contracts with maturities between 99 and 999 years, while freeholds are perpetual ownership contracts. The difference between leasehold and freehold prices reflects the present value of perpetual rental income starting at ...
Journal Article
Why Immigration Is an Urban Phenomenon
Immigration is fundamentally an urban phenomenon. Both in the United States and elsewhere, immigrants settle primarily in cities—especially high-wage, high cost-of-living cities. The most likely reason is that immigrants often send a significant share of their income back to their origin country. As a result, they value a city’s high wages and are less discouraged by the high living costs than native-born workers. Migration policies can reinforce this urban concentration pattern.
Working Paper
The Economic Status of People with Disabilities and their Families since the Great Recession
People with disabilities face substantial barriers to sustained employment and stable, adequateincome. We assess how they and their families fared during the long economic expansion thatfollowed the Great Recession of 2007-09, using data from the monthly Current PopulationSurvey (CPS) and the March CPS annual income supplement. We find that the expansionbolstered the well-being of people with disabilities and in particular their relative labor marketengagement. We also find that applications and awards for federal disability benefits fell duringthe expansion. On balance, our results suggest ...
Journal Article
Black–White Differences in Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the U.S.
In recent decades, blacks have experienced substantially less upward mobility and substantially more downward mobility from one generation to the next than whites. These results are shown to be highly robust to a variety of measurement issues. The author examines rates of intergenerational mobility by race and asks whether such racial differences in the U.S. are likely to be eliminated and, if so, how long it might take.
Journal Article
Determinants of Housing Values and Variations in Home Prices Across Neighborhoods in Cook County
From 2007 to 2009, the U.S. underwent one of the worst recessions in its history, a recession triggered by an unprecedented, international financial crisis that resulted from institutional portfolio concentration in securities backed by home mortgages, and the collapse of that securities market. The period saw a wave of defaults and foreclosures that spared almost no communities in metropolitan areas throughout the country (Bajaj and Story, 2008). Loan defaults and foreclosures, which had tended to be concentrated in lower-income and minority neighborhoods, spread to new and diverse ...
Journal Article
Market Failure and Community Economic Development in the US
This article explores the "political economy of community development" in the United States, with historical context on market failures. The authors, for the purposes of this article, also explore lending patterns in the Seventh Federal Reserve District.
Journal Article
Maintaining Housing Affordability: The Role of University Partnerships in Iowa City and Other Communities
This article comprises two main elements; the first is a review of this process and those meetings. It begins with an overview of how UI policies have impacted affordable housing markets in Johnson County, the county home of Iowa City. The second section describes university partnerships that involve institutional engagement to address local housing issues and other local needs, shared by three university professionals from Drexel University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. The conclusion is a short description of next steps.